Thoughts on how to improve shooting’s mainstream popularity by Bruce Gray

It will take three things to improve shooting’s popularity among non-competition gun owners and the general public.

  • The game has to be interesting to watch on TV. Things like Top Shot are good because even Average Joe can figure out who won and who lost. We’d have to change the events in some ways. Maybe a real-time leaderboard would help, but probably wouldn’t be enough.
  • Sponsors who will pay to televise it. Let’s face it, most of the “big” sponsorships in our sport are actually pretty small when you consider the millions that KPMG pays to put their name on the broadcast rights for a golf tournament. But that depends on…
  • There being enough viewers to make it worthwhile to the sponsors. I don’t know how to fix that one. Yes, there are something like 80-million gun owners in the country, but… the vast majority of them don’t shoot competitively, nor do they particularly have an interest in watching us shoot competitively.

IMHO, it probably starts with making the game viewer-friendly. After all, Wipeout gets aired on primetime on one of the major networks, and I watch it, even though I have no interest in playing. So… if we can figure out how to unlock that “can’t wait to see the next episode” thing for Mr. and Mrs Average, the rest of it might follow.

As it is now, I don’t even care about watching shooting sports on TV, and I’m an active participant. That’s a problem.